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Just as no two homes are identical, projectors designed for home use vary widely in price, features, purpose, and capabilities. They range from tiny pico and palmtop projectors to home-theater models capable of anchoring a home cinema room. Some are geared toward gaming, and most handle video (and photos) reasonably well. Here we pose and answer some questions to help you determine what sort of home projector is best for you.

What Types of Content Do You Plan To View with Your Projector?
There are 4 basic kinds of content you can view with a projector: data, video, photos, and games. Most projectors can handle all of them, but each projector type has its forte. Business (or data) projectors tend to be best at displaying data presentations (PowerPoint slides, PDFs, Excel files, and the like). Consumer or home projectors such as home entertainment projectors, home theater projectors, and video projectors are more geared to video viewing. Projectors that do well with video also tend to be good at projecting photos. Gaming projectors are a small but growing niche.

Your own needs should determine which variety of projector to get. If you want a high-resolution projector for screening videos in a dark room, you'll want a home theater projector. If you're using the projector mostly for gaming, you'll want a gaming projector. Home entertainment projectors are capable of replacing HDTVs in family rooms and can stand up well to ambient light.

Many consumer projectors are versatile, able to do justice to a range of content. If, say, you have a home office and occasionally need to show data presentations but also want to use the projector for entertainment, you may want to get a consumer projector that also does well at showing data.

How Portable Does Your Projector Need to Be?
A home projector needn't be a homebody. Most are portable enough to travel with, or at least to easily move from room to room. (The main exception is home theater projectors, which you may want to permanently install.) The gaming projectors we've seen are easily luggable to a LAN party. Micro-projectorspico projectors, most of which can fit into a shirt pocket, palmtop models, which can fit in an outstretched hand, or slightly larger modelsare highly portable, and come in both consumer and business models.

What Resolution Should Your Projector Be?
Ideally, your projector's native resolutionthe number of pixels in its displayshould match the resolution of the content you'll most frequently be displaying. For videos and games, you'll want a widescreen native aspect ratio such as 16:9 or 16:10. Both 1080p (1,920 by 1,080 pixels) and 720p (1,280 by 720) have 16:9 aspect ratios, while WXGA projectors (1,280 by 800) are 16:10. Both home theater and home entertainment projectors are best with 1080p resolutions, though many consumers are satisfied with less expensive 720p models.

Data projectors have traditionally used 4:3 aspect ratios such as 800 by 600 and 1,024 by 768, although as widescreen laptops have become ubiquitous, presentations are more frequently composed at widescreen aspect ratios.

How Bright Should Your Projector Be?
Consumer-level projectors range in brightness from less than 100 lumens for pico projectors to several thousand for video and home entertainment models. How bright your projector should be depends largely on two things: lighting and image size. If you're okay with relatively small images and/or plan to project mostly in a darkened room, you can get by with lower brightness. A home entertainment projector for a family room should be brighter, around 2,000 lumens if not more.

Keep in mind that perception of brightness is measured logarithmically; it takes a lot more than doubling the number of lumens for an image to appear twice as bright. Thus, modest differences in rated brightness (say, 2,200 and 2,500 lumens) are usually of little significance.

As Analyst for printers, scanners, and projectors, Tony Hoffman tests and reviews these products and provides news coverage for these categories. Tony has worked at PC Magazine since 2004, first as a Staff Editor, then as Reviews Editor, and more recently as Managing Editor for the printers, scanners, and projectors team.
In addition to editing, Tony has written articles on digital photography and reviews of digital cameras, PCs, and iPhone apps
Prior to joining the PCMag team, Tony worked for 17 years in magazine and journal...
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